Abstract: A fundamental task in human chromosome analysis is chromosome segmentation.
Segmentation plays an important role in chromosome karyotyping. The first step
in segmentation is to remove intrusive objects such as stain debris and other
noises. The next step is detection of touching and overlapping chromosomes, and
the final step is separation of such chromosomes. Common methods for separation
between touching chromosomes are interactive and require human intervention for
correct separation between touching and overlapping chromosomes. In this paper,
a geometric-based method is used for automatic detection of touching and
overlapping chromosomes and separating them. The proposed scheme performs
segmentation in two phases. In the first phase, chromosome clusters are
detected using three geometric criteria, and in the second phase, chromosome
clusters are separated using a cut-line. Most of earlier methods did not work
properly in case of chromosome clusters that contained more than two
chromosomes. Our method, on the other hand, is quite efficient in separation of
such chromosome clusters. At each step, one separation will be performed and
this algorithm is repeated until all individual chromosomes are separated.
Another important point about the proposed method is that it uses the geometric
features of chromosomes which are independent of the type of images and it can
easily be applied to any type of images such as binary images and does not
require multispectral images as well. We have applied our method to a database
containing 62 touching and partially overlapping chromosomes and a success rate
of 91.9% is achieved.